GOVERNANCE.md

Rook Governance

This document defines governance policies for the Rook project.

Maintainer Roles

Rook uses a two-tiered system of maintainer roles:

• Senior Maintainers
  • Have the most experience with the Rook project and are expected to have the knowledge and insight to lead the project's growth and improvement
  • Represent their organization within the Rook community
  • Oversee the process for adding new maintainers and provides guidance for the standard maintainers
  • Receive two votes in the conflict resolution and voting process described below
• Standard Maintainers
  • Have less experience with the Rook project than senior maintainers, but are also expected to provide significant value to the project, helping it grow and improve
  • Receive one vote in the voting process

Becoming a maintainer

The current list of maintainers is published and updated in OWNERS.md.

Maintainer Pre-requisites

To become a maintainer you need to demonstrate the following:

• A strong commitment to the project
  • Participate in design and technical discussions
  • Contribute non-trivial pull requests
  • Perform code reviews on other's pull requests
  • Answer user questions and troubleshoot issues in the field
• Ability to write good solid code
• Ability to collaborate with the team
• Understanding of how the team works (policies, processes for testing and code review, etc.)
• Understanding of the project's code base and coding style

Your organization is not yet a maintainer

• Express interest to the senior maintainers directly that your organization is interested in becoming a maintainer. Becoming a maintainer generally means that you are going to be spending substantial time (>25%) on Rook for the foreseeable future. You should have domain expertise and be extremely proficient with Kubernetes and Golang. Ultimately your goal is to become a senior maintainer that will represent your organization.
• You should likely have already been commenting on pull requests and issues with the intent of solving user problems and improving the overall quality of the project.
• We will expect you to start contributing increasingly complicated PRs, under the guidance of the existing senior maintainers.
• We may ask you to do some PRs from our backlog.
• As you gain experience with the code base and our standards, we will ask you to do code reviews for incoming PRs (i.e., all maintainers are expected to shoulder a proportional share of community reviews).
• After a period of approximately 2-3 months of working together and making sure we see eye to eye, the existing senior maintainers will confer and decide whether to grant maintainer status or not. We make no guarantees on the length of time this will take, but 2-3 months is the approximate goal.

Your organization is currently a maintainer

• First decide whether your organization really needs more people with maintainer access. Valid reasons are "blast radius", a large organization that is working on multiple unrelated projects, etc.
• Contact a senior maintainer for your organization and express interest.
• Start doing PRs and code reviews under the guidance of your senior maintainer.
• After a period of 1-2 months the existing senior maintainers will discuss granting "standard" maintainer access.
• "Standard" maintainer access can be upgraded to "senior" maintainer access after another 1-2 months of work and another conference of the existing senior committers.

Removing a maintainer

If a maintainer is no longer interested or cannot perform the maintainer duties listed above, they should volunteer to be moved to emeritus status. In extreme cases this can also occur by a vote of the maintainers per the voting process below.

Maintainer responsibilities

• Monitor email aliases.
• Monitor Slack (delayed response is perfectly acceptable).
• Attend the regularly recurring community meetings.
• Triage GitHub issues and perform pull request reviews for other maintainers and the community. The areas of specialization listed in OWNERS.md can be used to help with routing an issue/question to the right person.
• During GitHub issue triage, apply all applicable labels to each new issue. Labels are extremely useful for future issue follow up. Which labels to apply is somewhat subjective so just use your best judgment. A few of the most important labels that are not self explanatory are:
  • beginner: Mark any issue that can reasonably be accomplished by a new contributor with this label.
  • help wanted: Unless it is immediately obvious that someone is going to work on an issue (and if so assign it), mark it help wanted.
  • question: If it's unclear if an issue is immediately actionable, mark it with the question label. Questions are easy to search for and close out at a later time. Questions can be promoted to other issue types once it's clear they are actionable (at which point the question label should be removed).
• Make sure that ongoing PRs are moving forward at the right pace or closing them.
• In general continue to be willing to spend at least 25% of ones time working on Rook (~1.25 business days per week).

Github Project Administration

Maintainers will be added to the Rook GitHub organization (if they are not already) and added to the GitHub Maintainers team.

After 6 months, senior maintainers will be made an "owner" of the Rook GitHub organization.

Updating Change Approval Roles

The full change approval process is described in the contributing guide.

All new reviewers and approvers must be nominated by someone (anyone) opening a pull request that adds the nominated person’s name to the appropriate CODE-OWNERS files in the appropriate roles. Similarly, to remove a reviewer or approver, a pull request should be opened that removes their name from the appropriate CODE-OWNERS files.

The maintainer team will approve this update in the standard voting and conflict resolution process. Note that new reviewer/approver nominations do not go through the standard pull request approval described in the contributing guide, only the maintainer team can approve updates of members to the change approval roles.

Conflict resolution and voting

As previously mentioned, senior maintainers receive 2 votes each and standard maintainers receive 1 vote each.

In general, we prefer that technical issues and maintainer membership are amicably worked out between the persons involved. If a dispute cannot be decided independently, the maintainers can be called in to decide an issue. If the maintainers themselves cannot decide an issue, the issue will be resolved by voting. The voting process is a simple majority (except for maintainer changes, which require 2/3 majority as described below) in which each senior maintainer receives two votes and each standard maintainer receives one vote.

For formal votes, a specific statement of what is being voted on should be added to the relevant GitHub issue or PR. Maintainers should indicate their yes/no vote on that issue or PR, and after a suitable period of time (goal is by 5 business days), the votes will be tallied and the outcome noted. If any maintainers are unreachable during the voting period, postponing the completion of the voting process should be considered.

Additions and removals of maintainers require a 2/3 majority, while other decisions and changes require only a simple majority.